Veteran Spotlight: Bob Coco goes camping at Newfound Lake

A FORMER NAVY OFFICER FINDS SUCCESS IN BUSINESS — DESPITE COVID

In the winter of 2020, Bob Coco was having his best business year ever. Then came March.

When COVID struck, his successful skate-sharpening business came to an abrupt halt. “We went from six days a week at full speed to nothing, zero,” he says. “That was a shock.” Both his retail store and his international online business had to be shut down.

It was a business that Coco started when he retired from his service as an officer in the Navy in 2003. He knew he wanted to work for himself, so he took the skills he had learned sharpening skates for himself and his ice-hockey-playing friends and made a business out of it. He opened No-Icing Sports Hockey Pro Shop in a 600-square-foot store in Hudson.

“Well, it just took off,” he says. “I had this little niche. Nobody did what I did, and nobody did it as well as I did.” Within a year, he moved to a bigger store. Two years after that, he moved to a bigger store. Along the way, he went online with Skate Rescue Service, sharpening skates for people as far away as Australia.

Life was good, until it wasn’t. “After COVID, we maybe had one customer a day in June, July and August of 2020, if we were lucky,” Coco says. “You can’t keep a retail store open under those conditions.” With sports shut down across the country and no certainty about when the industry would come back, even his online business had to be shut down.

With his businesses suddenly shuttered, stuck at home with nothing to do — it was a terrible time for both him and his wife, Anita. “We weren’t making enough to pay the bills,” he says. He turned to Philip Rentz, a Business Development Officer at Service Credit Union, who facilitated a loan from the federal Paycheck Protection Program that he used for rent and utilities. His landlord also gave him a break. “That helped get us through,” he says.

By then, Gov. Chris Sununu had opened the state’s campgrounds, one of the few businesses that could safely operate at the time. After months of being at home, Coco and his wife decided to take their camper and head to a campground that was a short walk from

Newfound Lake in Bridgewater. “We were sitting around the fire, saying how much we liked the place, how well laid out it was,” Coco says. “Then my wife said, ‘It’s for sale.’”

Coco dismissed the thought, thinking they couldn’t afford to buy it, but when they got home, he checked out the selling price. It was low enough he figured it was doable. With financial advice and a business mortgage from Service CU, they bought the campground

in September 2020. After using Service CU for the PPP loan, Coco says it was the first place they thought of for the campground mortgage. As he was once in uniform, he got the special programs that Service Credit Union offers the military and veterans. (See sidebar.)

Now, a year later, they’ve doubled the previous owner’s best year. “I think it’s the best year the campground has ever had. Every weekend, other than maybe two or three out of the whole season, we were 100% occupied, every weekend,” he says. “Even weekdays, there were more people camping.” Before COVID, the occupancy rate ranged between 50% and 60%.

Why was business so good in the midst of COVID? Coco says, “People who would normally fly somewhere, go on a cruise or stay in a hotel weren’t doing that, but they wanted to do something.” A whole lot of people bought or rented campers. Manufacturers shipped more than 500,000 of them in 2021, according to industry statistics. That created a huge demand for campgrounds.

High demand and low overhead make for a successful business. Coco and his wife operate the campground with no employees. He says it’s easy to run, with little maintenance needed other than mowing the grass and hauling firewood. That leaves him time to run his other business: the online skate sharpening.

He had transported the sharpening equipment from his store to the campground, and so was ready when sports began opening up again. He does the sharpening in the morning and then tends to his campground duties the rest of the day. To date, he has about 12,000 online customers.

While the skate-sharpening business is likely to continue to flourish once COVID recedes, Coco knows the campground business might not. “We’re going to lose some,” he says, “but maybe quite a few will have gotten the bug and stay with it.”

Regardless, he’s happy he’s no longer in the retail business, happy to spend his days outdoors, happy to be near ATV trails and the lake, and have the time to enjoy them. As he says, “So far, so good.” n

Service Credit Union and the Military

When it was founded in 1957, Service Credit Union’s sole mission was to provide affordable credit to airmen and their families at what was then the Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth. Five decades later, its mission has expanded to those outside the military, but it is still providing special services for active duty military, veterans and their families with loan discounts, special savings programs and more.

Its work with the military has garnered numerous awards. Among the most recent:

• Newsweek magazine selected Service CU as having the “Best Military Savings Account” in its 2022 list of America’s Best Banks.

• In December 2021, Service CU was one of four credit unions selected by Personal Finance Insider for its list of “Best Banks and Credit Unions for Military Members and Their Families.”

• Investopedia selected Service CU as one of the “Best Credit Unions for 2021” for its services to the military and their families.

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